The Grey Room | Page 5

should always judge the man or woman who claimed such power to be
a charlatan. But that spirits of the departed have appeared and been
recognized by the living, who shall deny?
"My son-in-law has a striking case in his own recent experience. He
actually knows a man who was going to sail on the Lusitania, and his
greatest friend on earth, a soldier who fell on the Maine, appeared to
him and advised him not to do so. Tom's acquaintance could not say
that he heard words uttered, but he certainly recognized his dead friend
as he stood by his bedside, and he received into his mind a clear
warning before the vision disappeared. Is that so, Tom?"
"Exactly so, sir. And Jack Thwaites - that was the name of the man in
New York - told four others about it, and three took his tip and didn't
sail. The fourth went; but he wasn't drowned. He came out all right."

"The departed are certainly proved to appear in their own ghostly
persons - nay, they often have been seen to do so," admitted Travers.
"But I will never believe they are at our beck and call, to bang
tambourines or move furniture. We cannot ring up the dead as we ring
up the living on a telephone. The idea is insufferable and indecent.
Neither can anybody be used as a mouth-piece in that way, or tell us the
present position or occupation and interests of a dead man - or what he
smokes, or how his liquor tastes. Such ideas degrade our impressions of
life beyond the grave. They are, if I may say so, disgustingly
anthropomorphic. How can we even take it for granted that our spirits
will retain a human form and human attributes after death?"
"It would be both weak - minded and irreligious to attempt to get at
these things, no doubt," declared Colonel Vane.
"And they make confusion worse confounded by saying that evil spirits
pretend sometimes to hoodwink us by posing as good spirits. Now,
that's going too far," said Henry Lennox.
"But your own ghost, Sir Walter?" asked Fayre-Michell. "It is a curious
fact that most really ancient houses have some such addition. Is it a
family spectre? Is it fairly well authenticated? Does it reign in a
particular spot of house or garden? I ask from no idle curiosity. It is a
very interesting subject if approached in a proper spirit, as the
Psychical Research Society, of which I am a member, does approach
it."
"I am unprepared to admit that we have a ghost at all," repeated Sir
Walter. "Ancient houses, as you say, often get some legend tacked on
to them, and here a garden walk, or there a room, or passage, is
associated with something uncanny and contrary to experience. This is
an old Tudor place, and has been tinkered and altered in successive
generations. We have one room at the eastern end of the great corridor
which always suffered from a bad reputation. Nobody has ever seen
anything in our time, and neither my father nor grandfather ever handed
down any story of a personal experience. It is a bedroom, which you
shall see, if you care to do so. One very unfortunate and melancholy
thing happened in it. That was some twelve years ago, when Mary was

still a child - two years after my dear wife died."
"Tell us nothing that can cause you any pain, Walter," said Ernest
Travers.
"It caused me very acute pain at the time. Now it is old history and
mercifully one can look back with nothing but regret. One must,
however, mention an incident in my father's time, though it has nothing
to do with my own painful experience. However, that is part of the
story - if story it can be called. A death occurred in the Grey Room
when I was a child. Owing to the general vague feeling entertained
against it, we never put guests there, and so long ago as my father's day
it was relegated to a store place and lumber-store. But one Christmas,
when we were very full, there came quite unexpectedly on Christmas
Eve an aunt of my father - an extraordinary old character who never did
anything that might be foreseen. She had never come to the family
reunion before, yet appeared on this occasion, and declared that, as this
was going to be her last Christmas on earth, she had felt it right to join
the clan - my father being the head of the family. Her sudden advent
strained our resources, I suppose, but she herself reminded us of the
Grey Room, and, on hearing that it was empty, insisted on occupying it.
The place is a bedroom, and my